Review
8th Wonderland tells the story of the ‘world’s first virtual country’, a sort of Facebook democracy that includes citizenship duties and privileges and international relations as fraught as any in the real world. The film is a fantasy, but it tries in its sloppy, inconsistent way to raise questions about multiple citizenships and the nature of democracy in a globalized world.
A good chunk of the movie takes place in a video chatroom, where citizens of 8th Wonderland from all over the world meet to deliberate serious political topics. Every week someone proposes an initiative that the citizens then vote whether to implement or not. This makes 8th Wonderland, says one character, ‘a nation of true democracy’. The idea is interesting: direct democracy has always had supporters as the clearest way to represent people’s wishes. The problem here is that the policies 8th Wonderlanders want to change are not their own, but those in other countries. An early action seeks to pressure the United States to end its death penalty for certain criminals by kidnapping the turkey the president will pardon in an annual Thanksgiving Day ritual. (Note to non-Americans: this custom does exist.) The action, proposed by an internet café regular in Senegal, ends up misfiring: after days of wall-to-wall media coverage, the U.S. president decides to end the turkey pardoning, but not the death penalty.
At first caught up in the excitement of the grassroots activism shown by these citizens, I quickly wondered how it was ‘democratic’ to try to change policies in a foreign country. Indeed, this word quickly becomes replaced with ‘terrorism’ as 8th Wonderland passes initiatives that murder a politician and infect several innocents with HIV, all for the greater good, of course. The film is not clever enough to fully explore this question: is there an overlap between democratic action and terrorism? I don’t think so. Problematic, too, is how the film conflates the consensus of a random group of people with a country’s democratic process.
This was perhaps the biggest impediment to 8th Wonderland’s ability to be a state: its lack of place. This is a problem for the country’s detractors, including, eventually, the G8: ‘How do you stop a country that doesn’t exist?’ But it also eliminates the opportunity for 8th Wonderland to effect democratic change. If it were really a true democracy, its citizens would vote on issues that affected 8th Wonderland itself. Instead it is these issues that seem the least concern to the virtual citizens. At one point, someone jokes that ‘We’re the only country happy to get as many immigrants as possible’. This may seem funny, except for the discussions about online security aimed at keeping outsiders from hacking into the password-protected site. How one gets the password to enter this supposedly immigrant-friendly country is never explained. Indeed, such a discussion would have highlighted 8th Wonderland’s naturalisation policies, a valuable thought experiment.
Ultimately, then, 8th Wonderland is a disappointment. It opens with the promise to consider the idea of multiple citizenships using technology to foster direct democracy, a nation peopled with voluntary members. But it never really figures out the analogy. I left thinking that the main requirement to being a country was sovereignty, jurisdiction over physical space, not an engaged citizenry. I doubt this was the filmmakers’ intention.
The film does get one thing (almost) right. It uses the characters’ multilingualism to create a Babel of languages on the screen. The citizens of 8th Wonderland speak English to each other, but any number of languages with their loved ones. News clips interspersed throughout come from every corner of the globe. This must have made subtitling the film a chore, but it adds an authenticity lacking from every other aspect of the production.
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